to see what condition my condition was in

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Just got a poem published in Takahe (December 2006 edition): couple of contributors copies arrived in the post today, along with an actual cheque – first time I have ever been paid for a poem (thank you Creative New Zealand!)

It is a very silly poem, which I wrote almost exactly a year ago, called 'What Not To Wear On Holiday'. However am ridiculously pleased to see my name in print, even if they did manage to spell it wrong in the TOC.

We're off up the coast to spend Christmas and New Year at Jack's mum's beach house. UK readers, I cannot tell a lie: I may have somewhat exaggerated the balmy subtropical splendours that await us there – given the piss-poor weather conditions recently, it's more likely the stack of books I planned on carting onto the sands may have to be read in front of a roaring fire instead. But whatever the climate, we can hear the mighty Tasman roaring from the bed, and stare across it from the back porch, and, given the slightest encouragement (which I feel I just have been) I may end up writing the odd pome.

Happy Christmas everybody! We'll be back in time for my 20-week scan at the beginning of the year.

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even more pics ...

Saturday, December 16, 2006

... featuring Christmas festivities and Jack in lycra, can be found here.

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the hunt is over...

Thursday, December 07, 2006

...I have found the ultimate baby names site.

My to-be husband has a thing for "unique" names. He likes names such as "Veto" and "Enobi" [...] We were having dissagrements with baby names till I smacked him upside the head and phrohibid him from naming my children.

The Heir Presumptive ought to be quaking in his/her amniotic fluid about now.

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this will not stand ... man

Sunday, December 03, 2006

After a couple of vomit-free days, yesterday was a puke-o-rama, culminating in the pitiable spectacle of me drooling down the side of our battered (and now somewhat corroded) station wagon in the Countdown carpark – difficult to do while glancing nervously over one shoulder to make sure security guards aren't bearing down on you to arrest you for public drunkenness.

As of tomorrow I am fifteen weeks gone – as such, well into the second trimester and this pesky foetus needs to take the hint and stop making me sick already: I have grown him/her/it a placenta, what more does it want? Perhaps some sort of motivational sign is in order: Vomit-Free For [X] Days or similar. I could have it printed on a T-shirt, with velcro-on numbers.

We have a saying in this household: 'Don't piss off the pregnant.' (OK, not so much a saying as an edict.) Number one surefire way of accomplishing this: refraining from assuring me that throwing up for two months is 'a good sign', to which I can only reply, a good sign of what, exactly? That I have a heroic, not to mention hair-trigger, gag reflex? Useful, I'll grant you, when walking open-mouthed through areas densely populated with flying insects: less so when trying to maintain oral hygiene? Or indeed, perhaps it signals a bumper year for toothpaste manufacturers as I vainly attempt to prevent what's left of my tooth enamel from disappearing down the drain? This whole 'your suffering is a good thing' attitude is what I call vicarious forbearance – in other words, people being all 'up with your chinny-chin-chin' on your behalf because they don't think you are doing it properly, or enough. Smug bastards.

Watched The Big Lebowksi again the other night – on previous viewings I hadn't appreciated the extent to which it riffs on The Big Sleep: not only the crippled father but the two women – Julianne Moore as Maud Lebowski the older sister played by Katherine Hepburn rather than Lauren Bacall; the younger sister of Chandler's version becoming in the Coen's version Lebowski's trophy wife; drug-addled and blithely entangled with pornographers. And the hopeless, inarticulate, goofy Dude as the absolute anti-Philip Marlowe. I also love the fun the Coens had casting some of their usual suspects against type: Steve Buscemi the dopey bowling whizz who never gets to finish a sentence; John Turturro the creepy Banderas-wannabe, beneath the contempt of even the self-righteous Walter/John Goodman ('eight-year-olds, Dude') Cracking stuff. Plus it took my mind off vomiting for 117 blissful minutes.

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